Monday, March 1, 2010

People Are Talking About BDS

Emily W. Schaeffer
"When I was a little girl, I sent my allowance to the Jewish National Fund to plant trees in Israel in the name of family members. I was told and passed on stories about an underdog that after centuries of persecution had finally found refuge in its birthplace only to face a group of greedy, violent people that had homes on two continents but insisted on denying my people this tiny strip of land. More anti-Semitism, I thought.

It took only a few months of living in Israel as an undergraduate student in the late 1990s to discover the lies – or at least key missing information – from my childhood. When I dug further, I also found out how much these rewritings of history and of the present had taken the world captive and rendered some of the most politically and economically powerful world nations Israel’s great enablers. As long as relations with Israel are normalized, its actions go unchecked, and no one really asks about the details, about “Who Profits?”. After all, support for Israel is sold to the general public as a means of supporting the only democracy in the Middle East."

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